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How easy are these to clean? I use a Nalgene-type bottle to take my hippie powersmoothies to work. With the clear plastic, I can make sure all the wheat germ remnants are scrubbed away. In practice, do these survive the dishwasher?

please please don’t put your nalgene in the dishwasher!
Putting polycarbonate bottle in the dishwasher is what causes or, rather, contributes to the breakdown of polycarbonate into BPA. It should be noted that one of the main reasons this happens is that polycarbonate was first discovered and used as a synthetic estrogen. When it was found that it plasticized into a nice hard substance (and cheaply!), it was turned into the ubiquitous liner and bottle plastic that we know and love.

Who am I to say these things? I worked in the lab that started bringing this to light. We discovered it by accident- the cages that housed our experimental critters were PC. They began to decay or get cloudy through repeated hot water cycles and detergents. We didn’t think there was a problem until the experimental levels of recombination, which were supposed to be reduced, were higher than the controls.

Some testing, several assays, several years, and a lot of plastic industry crap later- the actual cause/effect relationship was established:

The most disturbing part of our findings were that there’s a large number of baby bottles manufactured using PC. More on that later if anyone’s interested in female reproductive physiology and oogenesis.

It’s stainless steel. You can stick it in a pot of boiling water if you want (without the cap — hand wash that). That should sterilize it pretty well. In the dishwasher it comes out just the same as anything else stainless steel does.